America is coming apart
We must act now to contain political violence, total government dysfunction, and the destruction of American social capital.
In the last several years we have seen:
- 2015: An Unprecedented President
- 2021: A violent assault on Congress to halt certification of the electoral vote count
- The mainstreaming and increasing normalization of extremist rhetoric against unpopular minorities on both sides of cultural issues
- An alarming, rapid increase in hate crimes and sporadic political violence
- Lifetime relations with friends and families destroyed by the politicization of every aspect of American life
How can “normie” citizens respond?
How can we make a positive difference in America without losing our families, our jobs, and our minds?
How can we make a small contribution to addressing America’s toxic polarization or - at least - to not make it worse?
Most important, how can we retain our decency and humanity no matter how this American and world crisis unfolds?
Please click “subscribe” and continue with me on this journey as I share what I’ve learned in weekly uploads.
Thank you for your valuable time, and let’s begin.
America is coming apart, with extreme polarization erasing norms of civil behavior, making elected office a performance rather than a civilized argument regarding policy, politicizing every aspect of private life from library books our children read to the hairstyles we wear and the beer we drink, and - worst of all - ruining cherished decades-long relations with family members, neighbors, and friends.
These divisions and the toxic polarization which results are accelerated by:
- Disruptive technological advances in digital communications and artificial intelligence,
- Our addiction to doom and outrage,
- Bad actors exploiting these technologies and human weaknesses for power and money.
- Outbreaks of political violence
For the worst of these bad actors, their weapons are
- Disinformation
- The delegitimization of democratic institutions,
- Incitement to hatred and acts of political violence,
- Paralyzing temptations to cynicism, looking out for #1, and opting out of our duties as citizens
Looking at individuals we find:
- Grifters and political opportunists,
- Politicians who are more moderate but are terrorized by their increasingly furious, energized, extremist base voters,
- Ordinary supporters - like us - who will hold their nose and back their “team’s” captain because the other team’s captain is made out to be Satan Himself.
The actions of these bad actors in government, the media, and corporations are increasingly leaving us
- Desensitized,
- Demoralized,
- Disengaged, and
- Dehumanized.
The Result?
A crisis leaving our families as spectators to a government circus of gridlock and clownish performance at the federal, state, and local levels, and
A pervasive atmosphere of fear in which our families are vulnerable to unpredictable outbreaks of lethal political violence undermining constitutional government..
If these corrupted pawns of the immense, impersonal, and divisive forces continuing to rip apart the social fabric in America and elsewhere, then we are dooming our children and future generations to an impoverished, illiberal, and violent succession of autocratic regimes.
If these divisive forces continue to rip apart the social fabric in America and elsewhere, then we are dooming future generations to an impoverished, violent, illiberal, and autocratic future.
But the powers ripping apart America’s social fabric cannot be solved at the level of these bad actors for it is we, ourselves, that empower these bad actors with our clicks, our cash, our votes, and our cable news time.
To counter them and to convert the non-dead-enders, we must - and can - first change ourselves.
That’s good news: we are players and have agency in this crisis!
Our civic duty is to lead our lives and set an example by being the adults in the room of political discourse and governance.
The first hard truth we must face is that our political and cultural leaders - for good or bad - do not really lead us.
Except for the very few who will challenge their base voters, they reflect us.
We are their bread and butter.
And therefore we have agency and leverage in this situation (that many of them earnestly hope we never discover and use. 😃 )
The second hard truth we must face is that we can’t just divide Americans into friends and enemies because
- We are all fellow hostages to the same tangle of impersonal, clashing, social powers,
- We are all inextricably part of the problem as we feed the wolves tearing us apart.
- Therefore, despite being Americans on opposite sides of the culture war, we are all fellow hostages rather than enemies of each other.
But the powers ripping apart America’s social fabric cannot be solved at the level of these bad actors for it is we, ourselves, that empower these bad actors with our money and screen time.
Whether we are red or blue, we feed our favorite wolves and give them power, so we are as gripped by forces beyond the control of any one person or political party as they are.
In this sense, excepting the violent, we have no American enemies: we are all hostages whether we watch Fox or MSNBC or CNN or Newsmax or Facebook or Twitter or whatever.
The third hard truth we must face is that cannot solve this by just shooting or jailing the bad guys because, as we’ll see in a later video, this is a complex, systemic crisis with many moving parts where a direct, head-on attack can cause many destructive and unforeseen consequences - some of which will be worse than the one aspect we were attempting to address.
America is currently at war with its true enemy: the enemy of all free people and that enemy is not liberal or conservative.
That enemy is violence. The power of death wielded as a weapon by victims corrupted by its lure as surely as Tolkien’s Gollum and Saruman were corrupted by the Ring of Power.
America is nearing a tipping point where we must decide whether we will choose our nation’s way based on negotiating with adversaries and voting under the rule of law or whether that way will be determined by the warlord or militia with the greatest capacity for violence.
The emerging American conflict can be won by “the exhausted majority” attempting to fulfil the duties of family, careers, and local communities.
It will not be easy and it will not be quick.
Yet we of “the exhausted majority”, have powerful tools of our own.
In this introduction to #ReunionAmerica, our initial tools will include (in recommended order):
- AMERICA IS COMING APART
- YOU ARE HERE: Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and Pluralism
- SOCIAL CAPITAL: The Value of Social Networks
- POLARIZATION: It's Complicated
- SOCIAL NETWORKS: Bonding, Bridging, and Linking
- LIBERALISM: Did the Counter-Enlightenment Have a Point?
- DECISION: Is the Universe a Friendly Place?
- BRAIN AND GUT: Enlightenment Knowledge versus Anti-Elitist "Common Sense"
- NATURE & NURTURE: The Social Construction of Reality
- IDEOLOGY AND POLITICS: Conflicting Mental Shortcuts to the Good Life and the Good Community
So, next up?
YOU ARE HERE: Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and Pluralism